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Baxter Academy leadership dispute moves online

“It’s unfortunate that he’s trying to hold the school hostage but that’s what he’s doing,” says Allison Crean Davis, the vice chair of the board of directors of the Baxter Academy for Technology and Science.

This story was updated at 11:15 a.m. 3/9/13 to add comments froma group representing parents affiliated with the school.

PORTLAND — A dispute broke out Friday over control of the websites for Portland’s first charter school, one day after its board of directors fired the school’s founder and executive director, John Jaques.

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John Jaques, founder of the Baxter Academy for Technology and Science, has been removed as executive director of the fledgling charter school by the school's board of directors. Gregory Rec / Staff Photographer

In firing Jaques, the board of directors said there was “a pattern of mismanagement.”

But Jaques said he was fired because the father of a member of the school’s advisory board promised to donate as much as $250,000 if Jaques was no longer in charge. He denied any financial mismanagement

On Friday, board Chairwoman Kelli Pryor sent an email to parents who have expressed interest in having their children attend the charter school, inviting them to a closed conference call with board members Friday night to talk about the controversy.

“We on the board all realize how horrific these past weeks have been for each of you,” she wrote.

On Saturday, a group representing parents affiliated with the school said they were “grateful” to Jaques for starting the school, and to the board for making “difficult choices.”

“Change is hard but the vision is solid,” wrote Ruth Dean, chair of the Friends of Baxter Academy. “We want this wonderful school to open this fall as planned.”

Baxter Academy has been approved by the Maine Charter School Commission to open this fall, under a state law passed in 2011. As of the March 1 deadline for applications, about 160 students were interested in the school, which needs about 150 students to open.

The board of directors sent Jaques an email Thursday demanding access to the websites and all applications for teaching and staff positions, and control of all phone lines, email accounts and Google Docs, which the school was using for most of its data.

“It’s unfortunate that he’s trying to hold the school hostage, but that’s what he’s doing,” Crean Davis said Friday morning.

Jaques locked the board out of the Google Docs weeks ago, she said. They included parents’ contact information and other school-related information.

“We need access to those tools,” Crean Davis said. “They are tools for the organization. They are not in an individual’s possession.”

“There is an ongoing dispute with the board of directors for Baxter Academy over the ownership rights to the intellectual property that I developed in support of the school,” Jaques said. “A number of people have access to the website and one of them posted my statement without my knowledge. I have taken the website offline temporarily until we can resolve the ownership issues.”

Pryor said in her email to parents that the board is trying to reach a settlement “for the good of the school.”

“That has been our sole working purpose: the good of the school. It would be unreasonable to expect that you can yet trust that, but it is our fervent desire to prove it to you — by working with you to create the school all of us have believed in all along,” she wrote.

Jaques said Thursday that he personally registered and owned the domain name www.baxteracademy.org when he founded the school. He never turned it over to Baxter Academies, the nonprofit organization that runs the school.

“I feel the ownership of the ideas, the intellectual property, is mine and I’ll use it if I go on to found another charter school in Maine or in another state,” he said.

According to whois, an online registry of URL owners, www.baxteracademy.org was set up through DreamHost, a web-hosting service and domain name registrar.

Jaques said he was unpaid when he founded the school, but became the sole paid employee of Baxter Academies. According to IRS documents, Jaques was paid $36,783 in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available. He said his annual salary was $63,000.

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